'Win or Lose' is a definite winner.

The words ‘Pixar Original Disney+ Exclusive TV Show’ pop up on your screen, and suddenly your blood pressure spikes. Those industry titans of the early 2000s who seemingly couldn’t help but knock it out of the park have finally kicked the bucket and gone full streamer. ‘It makes sense,’ you tell yourself as you begin to round up your old Pixar merch like Andy at the end of Toy Story 3, ‘all good things must come to an end.’ The Wall-E pop figure your parents got you years ago looks at you, as if pleading that they’re still the same as they once were. Looking away, tears fall onto your cheeks as you drop a fluffy Mike Wazowski action figure into a trash bag, signifying the end of your childhood as you know it. And, scene.

It's a shame to say, but this will be some people’s instinctual gut reaction to ‘Win or Lose’, Pixar’s first foray into the world of TV. That’s par for the course for a studio that is currently weathering the storms of what has been 15 years of pushback, following a run of movies no animated studio, American or otherwise, has managed to replicate. Imagine making Toy Story, and then making A Bug's Life, and then making Toy Story 2, and then making Monsters Inc., and then making Finding Nemo, and then making The Incredibles: just writing it out on the page opens your eyes to how much of a miracle it is. Now, people expect that every single time. A small blip like Cars 2 seems comparatively catastrophic, until you end up in 2025, where people view the idea of a Pixar TV show as taking one step into an already dug grave.

That’s the world of the Internet (and of hyperbole, though those are often synonymous). In reality, modern Pixar hasn’t been the story of a studio in decline but of a studio in flux, coming to terms with their position as animation heavyweights and reckoning with the power they have because of that. A movie like Turning Red, which relishes in its cultural specificity, could not, and more importantly, would not have been made 20 years ago. The blunt depiction of immigration within Elemental, or the open and loving ode to black culture in Soul: these are all things that would’ve been squashed, or neutered under the guise of it not being as broadly appealing, of course, meaning white. That run of masterpiece after masterpiece has given them so much cultural capital that they are now cashing in on telling the unsung stories of underprivileged minorities. Or, as the person in the introduction would see it, ‘they’ve gone woke'.

Strange criticism towards a studio that brought you the environmentalist epic ‘Wall-E’ that couldn’t have been more obvious in its messaging if it plastered ‘THIS IS ABOUT CONSUMERISM’ over its 100-minute runtime, but person who uses the word ‘woke’ unironically does as the person who uses the word ‘woke’ unironically do. No, Pixar have always been didactic, and we should applaud specificity in storytelling whenever we see it, which is why ‘Win or Lose’ shouldn’t have been swept under the Disney+ rug as it was. The show follows each member of the Pickles, a famously bad middle school softball team, in the lead up to their very first championship game, and we see how their personal lives affect their performance on the field. There’s Laurie (Rosie Foss), the coach's daughter, who worries that she’s only on the team because of nepotism and isn’t good enough to play. There’s Frank (Josh Thomson), the umpire, who is a lonely teacher desperate for a relationship and shields himself from any meaningful connections out of fear of getting hurt. And so on, and so on.

That these stories aren’t all focused on straight white boys might break a few hearts, especially given the show is about softball and famously ‘girls don’t play sports’, but the change in perspective episode to episode is what you’re watching the show for. The best example of this shift is in episodes 3 and 4, ‘Raspberry’ and ‘Pickle’. We first see the week in the life of Rochelle (Milan Ray) as she tries to navigate financial hardship that she believes her mother, Vanessa (Rosa Salazar), is too immature to handle. Vanessa is characterised as obsessed with her phone, lazy, and a bad parent. Rochelle feels like she must act like an adult despite being a child. In one of the show’s great moves, every character gets a visual motif for their struggles. For Rochelle, that means she grows tall and becomes an adult. The next episode shows the opposite: Vanessa is a struggling single mum, trying to make ends meet, and watches as her child slowly drifts away from her. It’s this shift in perspective that the entire show revolves around; characters quickly becoming 3d, even as we learn about everyone else.

And it’s what’s so surprising about ‘Win or Lose’: it’s a TV show. Pixar uses the difference in form far more effectively than you’d imagine, and makes the transition from film to television seamlessly. There isn’t the same longing to go back and learn more about another character that you prefer, a major issue with anthology shows, because you see the same characters from different viewpoints in every episode, slowly piecing together their puzzle by yourself. By the final episode, whether they win the softball game becomes irrelevant; we just want to see how this group of people comes together despite what’s going on at home.

‘Win or Lose’ is Pixar at its very best, and the show represents how to use streaming to the studios' and consumers' advantage to create something new and fresh. Perfect family entertainment, expressive animation, funny, quirky, relatable, repeated for 8 glorious episodes. If this doesn’t get another season it’d be a surprise, because it’s great tele.